Via Anil’s daily links, an excellent article in Joel on Software on the topic of biculturalism between Linux and Windows programmers.
It’s a great article, with spot-on assessments of core values in both communities, and nice analogies to geographically based cultural differences. Here’s a representative excerpt:
I have heard economists claim that Silicon Valley could never be recreated in, say, France, because the French culture puts such a high penalty on failure that entrepreneurs are not willing to risk it. Maybe the same thing is true of Linux: it may never be a desktop operating system because the culture values things which prevent it. OS X is the proof: Apple finally created Unix for Aunt Marge, but only because the engineers and managers at Apple were firmly of the end-user culture (which I’ve been imperialistically calling “the Windows Culture” even though historically it originated at Apple). They rejected the Unix culture’s fundamental norm of programmer-centricity. They even renamed core directories — heretical! — to use common English words like “applications” and “library” instead of “bin” and “lib.”
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